Adventures in urban astrophotography

Above my home in downtown Chicago, the sky is afflicted with a sickly orange glow. On an average night, climbing the stairs to the rooftop deck over my garage might only yield a view of a dozen stars, and a couple of those are usually planets. Sadly, the middle of a densely populated metropolitan area isn’t the ideal setting for astrophotography.
That doesn’t mean you can’t do it anyway. In fact, as I’ve found out in the past few months, it can be a lot of fun, and with a little patience I’ve been able to capture some modest pictures of the cosmos.
This article appeared on the Planetary Society Blog.
I am, without a doubt, not a professional photographer. I purchased my first digital single-lens reflex camera — a Nikon D5100 — late last year. Almost immediately, I began turning it towards the night sky. There are a lot of Internet guides on astrophotography, but I found that most assume you’re in a setting more ideal than mine, which resulted in most of my early attempts being washed out by streetlights and skyglow.
Venus (bottom) and Jupiter share a spot of sky divided by a set ...